Day 29 - Jan 29th
A Wooden Balcony on the Banks of the Saône Near Tournus
(An Ode to Pernod)
There comes a time
on holiday
when something is ordered,
by someone,
intentionally,
significantly,
and all is well.
The path has been chosen.
All that was unleavened
starts to rise.
What a talent!
so unobtrusive,
the hand that rocks the universe.
Thank God for that.
Subtle revelry,
pure alchemy,
something out of nothing,
or very little.
I can do it.
And I had a friend who could too—
produced a Hamlet cigar
on pavement, passed around the little tin.
Ramshackle backpackers,
in full parody,
when things were going to shit.
He looked like a tit,
but I loved him all the more for it.
Where there are two or three gathered
there in my name,
there I am—
I am.
I am.
Whatever gets you there.
Really.
Whatever gets you there.
But know
that too much will lead you astray.
You can no more stay
up here
than Hillary could atop the peak,
too breathless to speak of it.
There is so little to say
anyway.
The real miracles make no noise.
Your friends, the Sherpas, will tug upon your elbow:
"Let’s go back down now."
No.
No.
No.
They have to slip away.
You have become the death zone.
The Sherpa hears creaks you do not,
in the ice,
or from the rot,
deep within the wooden balcony
that overhangs such a river—
such a river!
Thundering over rocks beneath the balcony.
Alpine deliverance.
Such purity will kill a man
should he fall in,
like looking directly upon a god.
But some of us will wish to stay.
Encore une tournée!
we will say.
But they banned the absinthe
for a reason.
Because it is a heady season
and session,
and after you have lost the run of yourself,
and it has driven you mad,
it will kill you.
So when the sacerdotal maidservant has gone,
when Sherpas suggest,
"Should we dander on?"
don’t say no.
Just get up and go.
Say, Ça suffit!
Ça. suffit.
On y va!
Allons-y!
Because return to work you must,
and toil,
that’s what makes the soil
that grows the stuff of Pernod.
Star anise,
woodworm,
hyssop,
coriander—
absinthe’s spirit lives on.
And the Sherpas will drink with you,
slower now, in the gaps,
between the ponts de neige.
And when someone orders something silly
on holiday—
like a Pernod—
don’t laugh.
It is Life’s vast labour,
at last,
restoring you all to druids.
Drinking down the interstitial fluid
of life’s everlasting feast.
Niall Campbell
In my 'random' set of selections (using Rick Rubin's tactic of picking a book at random off the shelf and opening to a random page to stimulate new writing or creativity), I had planned to pick page 107 from Cannery Row today.
However, I must have accidentally picked up another little orange book off the shelf—those classic Penguin orange covers look so similar. The passage I turned to was not remotely familiar, but it was beautiful.
When I checked the front page, I realised the book was The Little Prince. Yet, curiously, appended to the end of the book—but not mentioned anywhere on the title page—was another short passage piece. It turned out to be from Letter to a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I had never heard of this book before.
Saint-Exupéry wrote Letter to a Hostage in 1943 while in New York City, during his exile from Nazi-occupied France. At the time, he was advocating for the Free French Forces and reflecting on the friendships that sustained him.
As I read on, I was struck by a mention of a town. Oddly enough, I was familiar with the name of the town he described in this passage—though I’m fairly certain I’ve never actually been there.
What’s a bit spooky is that I think I have been there—imaginatively—with a client.
I use a technique based on re-appropriating the core tenets of Internal Family Systems (IFS). (That’s a whole other blog post, but in short...) I create a motif of a village that the client will populate.
IFS posits that we have multiple personalities or "parts" living within us, and the metaphor it uses is the family. The originator of the modality, Dick Schwartz, was a family-trained systems therapist. As a result, he mapped family dynamics onto our inner lives, conceptualising our "parts" as a family system.
But I don’t think it’s as neat and tidy as that.
I don’t think the fractal sense maps perfectly.
I find a better metaphor is that we are, internally, a village. A village is an incredibly deep psycho-technology that existed long before the agricultural revolution. It likely developed in lockstep with our hunter-gatherer history. Because of this, clients tend to have an intuitive sense for it.
Inner villages of old would have subsumed the concept of a genetic family. This remains true in some developed countries—visit an Irish village, for example, and your local friend will probably be related to half the people. No joke.
But a village doesn’t just include family—it encompasses kith and kin, which I think is a far more fertile way of thinking about relationships.
For many modern humans, the concept of family carries too much baggage. I didn’t find the metaphor of an "inner family" useful, so I swapped it out for the concept of a village.
What’s fascinating is that when I use hypnosis to create this inner village, clients enter a type of active imagination space and populate the village themselves. A village is substrate-independent. I’ve had clients create medieval castles as a village, a Thai soi, an old European town square, an Irish main street, or a Polynesian tribe full of mud huts.
Even more interesting is that the type of village that feels "right" to people doesn’t always correlate strongly with proximal their ethnic heritage.
People seem to grasp this concept naturally—we came from villages. This is where our real psychosocial development exploded, where our cerebellums started 'cooking with gas. The village. Palace intrigue has nothing on the dramas around the parish pump.
I find that the metaphor of the inner village can hold psychodynamic energies much better and more deeply than grafting the modern American concept of "family" onto the psyche. There’s more space for drama and play.
One technique I use is something I call "office hours."
In this exercise, the village elder or mayor (depending on the village’s era or style) represents the client themselves as they sit in my therapy room. They travel imaginatively "to" this place and act as an envoy or avatar for what IFS would call the capital-S Self.
In IFS, the "Self" is the core, compassionate, and authentic essence of a person. It is characterised by qualities like curiosity, calmness, confidence, and connection. The Self is distinct from the "parts" of a person (such as the inner critic or protector) and acts as a wise leader that helps to understand, heal, and integrate the parts into harmony. It is inherently whole, resilient, and unburdened, guiding the system toward balance and well-being.
This wise leader will sit somewhere in the village—perhaps at a little bistro table in the village square, on a tree stump in a forest clearing just at the edge of the village, or in the snug of a tavern in a medieval roadhouse. It’s always a social and central location within the "inner village."
It’s understood by all entities and people in the village (and I use "entities" intentionally, as I’ve encountered energies in clients that refuse to be anthropomorphised—a limitation of the IFS framework) that if you want an audience with the capital-S Self, this is where you go.
One client chose a town very similar to the one Antoine described in his passage. It might even have been the same town. But of course, I won’t say much more about that.
Here is the passage that inspired the poem. I’m glad it kept bouncing off the shelf toward me:
How then does life erect these lines of force by which we live?
What is the origin of the pressure that draws me towards the house of this particular friend? What are the key moments that make this presence one of the poles I need? What secret events shape our affections and, through these, our love of our homeland?The real miracles make no noise. The crucial events in a life are unobtrusive. Of that moment I wish to describe, there is so little to say that I must go over it again, as in a dream, and describe it to the friend whom it concerns.
It was on a day before the war, on the banks of the Saône near Tournus. We had picked a restaurant for lunch with a wooden balcony overhanging the river. Our elbows rested on a plain wooden table, scored by knives, and we had ordered two Pernods. Your doctor forbade you spirits, but on special occasions, you cheated. This was one such occasion. We could not tell why, but it was an occasion.
What made it so lighthearted was less tangible even than the quality of the light. And so you decided to order the Pernod that marked special occasions.
And since, a few steps away, two men were unloading a barge, you invited them to join us. We called down to them from the balcony, and they came, just like that. It seemed so obvious to invite these friends, because of the invisible sense of festivity possessing us, which was so contagious they responded to our call. So we sat together, drinking each other’s health. It felt good to be in the sun.
The poplars on the opposite bank, the plain stretching to the horizon, were bathed in this warm honey. And we went on getting more and more cheerful without knowing why. Everything made us feel at ease: the clear sunlight, the flowing river, the food, the bargemen who joined us, the maid who served us with a sort of natural grace, as though presiding over some everlasting feast.
The sense of bon vivant that Antoine captures in this passage resonates deeply with me. It reminds me of sittingwith friends at La Terrasse, a bar in Chamonix with a wooden balcony that similarly overhangs a river—in this case, the Arve. There’s an amazing bronze statue of Jacques Balmat and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure pointing toward Mont Blanc peak.
I lived in Chamonix for a time and went on several ski holidays there with friends. I know that feeling when someone orders a drink, on the first day of the holiday, and everyone else rubs their hands, thinking, We are here. Just brilliant craic. It’s lovely and, I hope, a universal feeling: social joy.
My poem also reflects on how we must be careful with material objects and things that bring us into contact with good cheer. Alcohol, of course, is prime among those, but any drug—and really, any element of the "good life"—can dimensionally tip into hedonism and then into the ‘awful life’.
I was listening to Rich Roll on The Diary of a CEO podcast today in the car as I drove to the office. As someone in recovery, Rich—who I think is one of the most nuanced and important voices on this topic in the influencer space right now—is always at pains to outline the dimensionality and ubiquity of the mechanisms underpinning addiction. He highlights how these mechanisms run through nearly all of society today. It’s not as binary as here are the bad times and the problems over here and here are the good times and the solutions over there.
Alcohol truly is a social solution for many people. While this may be an unpopular opinion, it comes from working with clients who attribute their initial social development to alcohol and other pro-social substances like MDMA.
For socially anxious, nervous, or desperately fearful adolescents, these substances can get them "off to the races" in becoming social. This understanding comes with the recognition that being social is about as optional as sleep for Homo sapiens. While the exact manner of optimal social life is bespoke to each individual, no one is an island. Solitary confinement is used as a punishment in supermax prisons for a reason.
We weren’t meant to be alone, and to give demon drink its due, it is an incredibly powerful and irritable social lubricant. However, many of my clients are "turbos" who don’t know when to stop.
By sheer dint of circumstance, I’ve never had a problem with alcohol. Many of the people I went to university with who are now career alcoholics were hiding in plain sight. Like the sherpas in the poem, I have pulled away from them socially.
I hope their therapists, or whoever supported them back to sobriety, helped them understand that their drinking likely started out in plain sight under the cover of the herd. For us, it was binge-drinking through medical and dental school. For them, it was the beginning.
Untangling good cheer from addiction, connection from codependence, and hedonism from la dolce vita is tricky. It will always be tricky. But the light and shade of it all—that’s what makes it special.
Drink Pernod. Even drink a wee bit of absinthe once in a while. Just don’t ever become a hostage to it.